Politics Government Books

This Audio CD is a useful supplement to the Ordinary Parent's Guide. You may be suprised to find you actually don't know how to pronounce many of the letters of the alphabet correctly. It is very important you teach them correctly to your children, especially if they have any speech difficulties. For example, 'D' is not pronounced 'duh'. Teach your child the wrong pronunciation and they may wind up having some difficulty sounding out words. The CD will model for you the difference between the voiced and unvoiced consonants, which will be invaluable. There are also some fun song tracks, and the complete Consonant Rhyme, which is learned in the book. You can just turn this on, and Presto! It isn't meant to listened to beginning to end, however.

Parents must be part of the education of their children early on if children are going to learn to read and enjoy it.This book gives some great tips on exactly that. Also a must-have for parents are two lovely pieces of children's literature which children really enjoy. The 10-page scripted guide allows parents to start teaching reading skills early on:Life's Little Lessons: An Inch-By-Inch Tale of Success
and The Big Squeal: A Wild, True, and Twisted Tail.

So far, my kids are learning and reviewing the letter sounds and are enjoying the lessons. The rhymes are helpful. It is basic and easy to teach, and foundational for reading.

We are just beginning learning the sounds of letters, and what great focus this book gives you as the teacher. It guides you throughout the studies and combines the lessons for review. I have been pleasantly surprised about how thorough this book is.

After completing 89 lessons in this book, my daughter and I are calling it quits. We've worked on it on and off for over a year (she's 5 now), and for the sake of preserving a love of reading, have decided to shelve it. This book has been helpful in a number of ways; it is great for giving a parent the sense that they can indeed teach their own children, that reading is easy, and laying out a path for doing so. I have found it useful as a reference book, i.e. to show me what to introduce, remind me what the actual "rules" are, and give me direction for our lessons. However, there have been some significant problems.

1) The layout of the pages is daunting for a child. There are lots of words, no pictures, nothing to visually set apart the words that the child reads except that they're a bit larger. It seems overwhelming and very un-child-friendly.

2) The practice stories often make no sense, and fail to capture my daughter's interest at all. An example from today: "The black snake did wish that he had a snack of mice. The snake did scan the grass to prey on mice. The grey mice sat on the rock and ate nuts. The snake came to the rock. Hey! The mice fled. They hid in holes. The snake will have no snack this day." Awkward wording, nothing particularly interesting about that, no pictures. The optional follow-up activity is to illustrate this story and label the items.

3) The practice sentences are way too long, and overwhelm new readers. For example, the child has just been introduced to the "fl" blend (lesson 50), and reads the sentence, "Ducks in flocks flit and flap on the flat pond." This sentence is too long, has onomotopeic words with which they may not be familiar (flit), and makes them use the new rule 4 times!! Very frustrating for a child struggling to learn a new rule. This was one of 6 new blends introduced in this one lesson.

4) Exceptions are often introduced before rules. For example, today we learned that the vowel pair "ea" can sometimes make the long-a sound, as in great, break, steak. Okay, so my daughter goes to read "please", and says, "place". Of course! She's never been taught that "ea" USUALLY says the long-E sound. The old "when two vowels go walking" would have been helpful to learn first, not later. Also, today she learned that "ey" can say the long-A sound. So "smiley" is smilay until a later lesson... you get the picture. This has come up more than once.

5) Very rigid rules, introduced in a logical, but not necessarily helpful, order. Much more actual reading could be possible much sooner if they'd go ahead and introduce some of the more helpful rules out of sequence.

6) It would be helpful to introduce a number of sight words much earlier. Kids learn sight words very quickly, and a few of them up front can make many more books accessible.

If your child is VERY motivated to learn to read, I do think that this book will work. My 3-year-old son has this drive, and the first few lessons (we skip the letter-learning part) have taught him the basics of CVC words. But he would learn that just as easily if I just stuck some magnets on a board. My daughter is very global in her thinking, and is more interested in the content of stories than in mastering reading technique, and this book sends her running for cover. Honestly, I dread it, too. Fortunately she is now at the point where she can read basic easy readers, so we're going to drop this book, use it as a reference tool only, and continue with McGuffey Readers, Bob books, and everything on the library's easy reader shelf. For my other 3 kiddos, I'll be investigating other options.

Finally, someone has seen fit to be honest with the American public about the manipulations we are fed on a daily basis.

Thank God for patriots like David Kupelian. This is a great book, that really needs to be in every concerned Americans library.

Isn't life so much easier when we can avoid the pitfalls and stay clear of brain fog? This book is a lighthouse in the mist! Why especially so for mothers and caregivers serving as mothers? They are the starting point for each life that comes into the world. How wonderful to give that new life a solid light to follow and a strong, solid rock to walk on so they can spend their time on this earth in the pursuit of happiness and freedom! We are grateful for the time and research and courage this author lives to bring us this work.

I knew when I read this it was true, as it further explained things I questioned growing up. Many condemn the author, I praise him for having the guts to speak the truth. I bought 5 copies, passed them out, got wow reviews and they passed the books on. I felt in my heart that more needed to understand the truth. And when you get done with this book, try 'brotherhood of darkness', an eye opener that explains a lot of what is taking place.

Much of what David Kupelian writes about in "The Marketing of Evil" is deeply troubling. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the same basic problems as the news stories on Mr. Kupelian's website WorldNetDaily: poor writing and an excess of "spin". His basic premises may be valid, but the way he puts forth his arguments are completely over-the-top.

He also suffers from the delusion that everyone who believes in traditional Judeo-Christian morality also agrees 100% with the Republican agenda when it comes to other issues. There are many religious believers out there who are conservative on sexual morality but liberal on things like the environment, the Middle East, social justice, multiculturalism, etc.

It's really too bad that this book wasn't better written, as its message is an important one for people to hear.

The premise and structure of the book are excellent and I commend the writer for putting together such a comprehensive work. However, I find the author's bias against, and for certain leaders to be highly questionable. It's clear to me that the author's personal opinions precluded him from putting together an objective view of the past.

For instance, the author lambasted Lyndon B. Johnson for his handling of Vietnam but he was extremely apologetic when writing about JFK's involvment in escalating said war. He even went so far as to offer his own excuse for why JFK decided to authorize the use of napalm and defoliating agents. He suggested contextually that JFK was somehow forced into his decisions by his advisors -- as though he couldn't think for himself, or is somehow immune from criticism regarding Vietnam.

Again, after writing about the Korean War, the author slams President George W. Bush for his "axis of evil" speech but then credits former (failed) president Jimmy Carter for being some kind of god-like peacemaker there in 1994. It's completely absurd and disregards many of the problems that continued in North Korea between 1994 and 2001. He acts as though N.Korea was all fine and wonderful until President Bush came along....what a joke. His glaring bias seeps off the pages and discredits his entire work -- which again, is unfortunate because I enjoyed most of the book.

I will say that I think his handling of President Clinton's administration was much more balanced. But again, this only serves to highlight his other more slanted views.

The book was in perfect condition. Came to my house quickly. Def. worth it...It was about 15 dollars cheaper than at my college bookstore!
So, Thanks!

I don't normally read non fiction but this book is excellent- giving a different view of history and war.

As someone who has taken only survey classes in history, this book was great for specifics in 20th century conflicts. The chapter on Yugoslavia was excellent and helped me write a great essay. I will always remember what the author said about evil being fascinating because it is hard to understand. There are also chapters about WW1, WW2, Iraq. Easy to read and very fun.

This was one of the best textbooks I have read in college. It covers most of the major wars post world war 2 and gives the history leading up to them. You can see a clear dichotomy where the major power in the world leading up to the conflict causes the conflict through foolish colonization policies. Mostly British for the first half and then the United States. It is a good summary overall and is a must have for any student in International Relations or military history. It is a well written and quick read. 5 stars.

I bought this book for a polital science class and had to stop during my study session to write this review. Was the editor on crack? Don't get me wrong, it's well written, but the paragraphs jump around haphazardly. I'll be reading about 9-11 in one paragraph and the next paragraph will be about the Bush-Gore election followed by a passage about Clinton's performance in office. Editors please put this stuff in chronological order!

This is a GREAT idea! Do not be fooled by some false negative reviews by idiots on here, most of whom have not even read the book!


Read 'Answering the Critics' for more info and clarity.

Lets get politicians on board!

There are many reasons this book is essentially worthless:

1. No corporate taxes? Great, I'll just create a corporation and buy everything I want through it. Anyone who knows this will never pay another dime in taxes again, and the federal government will be bankrupted.

2. The author talks about banning the income tax, but doesn't talk about what will happen to citizens that have already paid taxes to the government to generate a tax free income stream in retirement (Roth and After-Tax accounts). His idea would punish some of those that have planned ahead for retirement.

3. The book explains how the IRS should be abolished, yet doesn't say who would go about collecting taxes. (Note: look up the author's history with the IRS)

4. The idea of taxing food and writing a check for every single American every month to make up for that tax is so stupid I wasn't sure if it was a joke or not.

Admittedly I have not read this book cover to cover yet. I skipped right to the chapter that explains how the FairTax code would work, and I looked at some other chapters briefly to get a gist of what the authors had to say generally. So here are some thoughts based on that.

First off, how is it an invasion of privacy for us to file tax returns with the IRS, but not an invasion of privacy for me to tell the government the makeup of my household, complete with Social Security numbers, so they can send me the proper amount of "prebate"? I don't even have to give that much information on a census form; why would I want to do it for this? So, protecting one's privacy is a stupid reason to do away with the IRS.

Secondly, who says prices would drop if the tax code were radically changed? I only ever see prices drop when something goes on sale. Now, prices might start out lower when a product is introduced because overhead was lower to begin with, but they go up after that; it's almost a law of physics. People want to make money, and far too many people want to make far too much money at the expense of others. I don't like what that says for the potential of this plan to drive up prices to ridiculous levels.

Thirdly, the prebate system is a decent idea--beats the hell out of "helping" Americans afford something through tax credits, which you can only take once a year--but it's based on the government deciding what constitutes basic necessities and how much they should cost. If we can't trust the government for any other reason--and Boortz is a libertarian and surely believes we can't--how can we trust the government to accurately calculate basic cost of living?

I mean, really, take groceries for example. The government in its infinite wisdom has decided that whole grain is good for you and meat is bad, despite whatever evidence to the contrary. In its WIC program alone it's decided that women and children need junk food (cereal) and liquid sugar (fruit juice) above and beyond all else. So its idea of what I "need" for groceries is going to mean I'm out of luck if I actually want to feed my family correctly. Yay?

Also, define "new goods and services." Do I have to pay this twenty-three-percent tax on my residence? Does that mean I have to pay extra on top of my rent? But it's probably not a new building I'm living in. However, it would be new to me.

What about, say, eBay sellers? What if I buy a new product to resell on eBay, but haven't used it before I resell it? Is it still new? If so, wouldn't the tax be paid twice? How is that fair?

Furthermore, for all his liberal-bashing (and I consider myself one), I see Boortz has played right into the hands of a debate that I myself find problematic in liberal thinking: to wit, the idea that someone is wealthy because they have high income. That's stupid and Boortz should know better, which is particularly sad since he wants to position liberals as being guilty of class warfare while he's coming from the opposite perspective. No, he's not. Income is not a determinant of wealth. Net worth is. If you're making $100,000 a year and spending $99,999 of it--and some people do--you will not become wealthy no matter how much the tax code changes. People who really want to be wealthy will become so no matter what the tax code says or what politicians do. The fun part is that once you have the wealth, it reduces your effective tax rate because only when money changes hands is it taxed. Someone who makes that $100k a year will be taxed at the marginal rates for that $100k. Someone who HAS $100k is taxed at a far lower rate and only on the interest or dividends, which are much lower than what you'd have to pull in per month to have made $100k in a year. And because they aren't normal employment income, they aren't subject to the same taxes anyway (i.e., Social Security, etc.).

I'm surprised Boortz doesn't say this, but based on some of his other statements, I'm not surprised. As helpless as he is to (1) fill out tax returns, (2) save, or (3) invest thanks to the existence of the IRS, I'm shocked he's capable of putting his pants on right-side out or tying his own shoes. Most of us manage to do these things just fine if we take responsibility for our own behavior. But given Boortz's propensity for shooting off at the mouth and saying phenomenally stupid things on his radio show and in his other books, I wouldn't bet on his ability to take responsibility for his actions. In fact, I wouldn't even credit him with contributing in any way to the idea for this FairTax code--I suspect he only put his name on it because he agrees with it and wants to give it a wider audience through name recognition. It's a shame Congressman Linder couldn't get a wider audience on his own.

This book is a quick read and gives you an excellent starting point to understanding the FairTax. Boortz and Linder explain how the current tax system began and how it has been transformed into the complete mess that it is now.

The FairTax would be the most massive transfer of power from the politicians in Washington to the people in the history of this country. It would save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security! Our current system won't do that!

Read this book! You won't be disappointed! The second book is a great read too.

The old saying applies. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. The FairTax proposal is presented by the authors as beneficial to all US citizens. They present it as a Miracle Tax System, like snake oil presented by traveling salesmen, or green cloth, Holy Soap, or No-evil Oil promoted by Evangelicals.

Economics is the study of tradeoffs. You must lose a positive to gain a positive that you consider more valuable to you. This book on the FairTax refuses to recognize this fundamental definitional idea embedded in any economic or fiscal theory at all.

The book is demogoguery. Since most American readers do not possess critical thinking skills, many will find this manifesto worth reading. Nevertheless, all manifestos are essentially frauds, written by wolves in sheeps' clothing, whether the "Communist Manifesto" by Marx, "Milestones" by Qutb, or this very poorly and sarcastic piece of writing by radical extremists from the far right.

A sophisticated reader will see very shortly the intent of the book. I quote directly. "What (politicians) will lose (with the FairTax) is the ability to raise the sales tax rate (or any taxes) on just one segment of the population (the rich), while trying to curry favor with another segment (the non-rich).

This book pretends to be neutral, but in fact encourages the creation of a new Gilded Age, when "Robber Barons" ruled while most of the Americans suffered under that rule. The serious reader should read up on that period in America.

The key fraudulent assumption is that belief leads to fact. "Everything is possible, if you believe hard enough." That quote is from Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn't grow up. Just because each American may aspire to riches does not imply that any but a few will actually achieve significant wealth.

Beware of the fox who tries to persuade you to let him into your chicken coop, just for a few days. Then, if you don't think this idea is the best you have ever heard, simply ask the fox to leave.

We have tried this idea before, at the time of the Great Depression. It obviously did not work under Herbert Hoover. It will not work with the so-called FairTax. There are sound reasons why the New Deal came into existence, and why it continues to this day.

No matter how wonderful a panacea may be, there is always a dark side. The ancient Greek myth of Pandora shows the way. She was given many wonderful gifts for humanity, including a box. She was warned however not to open it. When she nevertheless did open the box, plagues came out. The FairTax may seem like a Panacea Tax, but beware it is not really a Pandora Tax instead.

I do give the book two stars, rather than one, because it reads very quickly. One can read it in a day, or better, skim it in an hour. The lack of serious data and analysis, the outright distortions of conclusions, the overly sarcastic tone, and the incompetence of the authors to show any economic understanding will entertain serious readers as any farce would.

price was high,should have come with study guide for the price.it was
cleaper in book store.

The book is okay on the information it gives in the text, but the supporting graphs and charts are always biased against the south. Patterson adds unnecessary clauses that insinuate stupidity and poverty. Also, he will always ask questions about why the South is lacking even though the graph says otherwise. Also, he mainly only shows one side politically. If it isn't required get another book

A republic? Not in our lifetime. Lies, back room deals, murder, impeachment. The things we have seen used to depose those in office who do not walk the line. Citizens asleep, vote for the most popular, or the smoothest talker. No Veronica we have no democracy. More fascism exists in our government than democracy. Compare; A movement or tendency, or idealogy that favors dictatorial government. See IRS. Centralized control of private enterprise. What now does Mom, and Pop own? Repression of all opposition, and extreme nationalism. See Career Politician. Democracy; The free and equal right of every citizen to participate in a system of government defined by electing representatives, of the people. "Not of the dollar," by the people. "Not just the rich," for the people. "Not for Corporation Internationale."

I love my country but too, too many of us take our freedom for granted. Like any well oiled machine Democracy needs maintenance, but we do not give our freedom a second look, we rely on others, "Career Politicians" to look out for our interest. In reality these people spend more time "Dollar Chasing" to be concerned with a little thing like "FREEDOM."

Pick up the book read it, and many more like it. Understand what a true Democracy is all about, and your part in it.

America in NOT a democracy.

Why would you title a book this way unless you were a proponent of a democracy. If there is anyone that wants to know the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy, they should seek other methods.

Benjamin Franklin was asked by a group of people as he left the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.... "Doctor, what type of government did the delegates give us?"

Franklin responded: "A republic, if you can keep it."

It is no wonder we are in the state we are today. The students aren't even being convinced to learn what a republic is! They are told to study books that advocate democracy.

I am brand new to the subject but found this book an excellent starting point. It has easy to read chapters and supporting graphs. I reccomend to anyone who may be interested or a text book.

Syl Sobel has taken a complicated subject and made it understandable and interesting for the elementary school student. This book is easy to read, with short chapters and filled with a ton of information. It also includes a lot of fun facts that everyone will enjoy about different presidents, their wives and some of our more interesting elections. A wonderful resource with a glossary, index and bibliography.

This is an Awesome book about presidential Elections! The interesting facts are fascinating and are about things you never have heard of before. Syl Sobel is my neighbor. CHECK OUT HIS BOOK!

This is an educational and fun book that could not have come at a better time! My family and I have enjoyed reading about the complex election process, which the author explains in a clear and enjoyable style.

Novick's piece is a good introduction to how history should be read, written and studied. I was assigned this book in my undergraduate historical methods course and found it to be useful in understanding why history is more complex than most people believe. Historians can not simply read one book on a subject and take as gospel. In graduate school I was assigned Mark Gilderhus' History and Historians, David Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, Davidson and Lytle's After the Fact and Richard Evans' In Defense of History which helped me continue the journey started with Novick.

For all the attention given in recent years to the social context of discourse, remarkably little has been given to the way in which the context of modern academia shapes the way we think about the past. One of the really satisfying things about Peter Novick's 1988 book, That Noble Dream, his history of the American historical profession, is the way-despite its tendency toward relativism and complacency-it turns the armamentarium of critical historical scholarship against the activity of critical historical scholarship itself. One can't read the book and not come away with a deep sense of how much our sense of the past has been hopelessly muddled by the internal imperatives of the profession. It is by endless cycles of cutting and slashing, revising and revisioning, "neo"ing and "post"ing, interrogating and all the rest of the tedious professional jargon, that reputations are made, empires are built, careers are jumpstarted, and-not to put too fine a point on it-tenure is won and promotion secured. The dynamic of revisionism, a dynamic of churning, incessant novelty, serves the cause of academic careerism even more than it does the cause of political correctness. And such careerism and specialization has the effect of stamping out an appreciative sense of the past.

This author writing about objectivity seemed to really struggle with it himself. There is so much bias present that it's difficult to discern when Novick is speaking or when he is merely "echoing" the sentiments of others. Whatever the case, he simulatenously presents a valuable, if dense, tome about the history of history while, if it's taken at face value, failing to provide a fair and equitable account of the "objective truth."

When a professor assigned Peter Novick's "That Noble Dream" as one of the last readings in one of my seminars, I blanched. Who, I inwardly groaned, would force students to read a book this huge in the waning weeks of the semester, a time when the heavy weight of tests, papers, and grading exams rests on your shoulders? "Look at the size of that font! How in the heck are we supposed to get through that thing in a week?" wailed a fellow sufferer, echoing what we all thought as we blearily thumbed through the book. Initial skimming seemed to confirm that this would be one of those scholarly books that take years off your life even as you promptly forget what you read a mere five minutes ago. Now, I've done some power reading during my tenure as an undergraduate and graduate student; I once cruised through Herodotus in two days and Thucycdides in even less time. You learn to accept things like this in the unnatural world of the academy. With lengthy papers due at the same time I opened this book, I decided to power stuff this one. Even now I can hear the knowing snickers of graduate students across the nation who may be reading this review, seminar hardened souls amused to no end that I actually assumed I had to READ the book. I can hear the chorus: just skim through it over the course of a few hours, learn the main argument, take a few notes, and nod sagely in class.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the end of Novick's treatment of the noble profession: I rapidly discovered that this book is brilliant; a veritable cathedral of razor sharp analysis, amazing use of primary source material, and all written with one eye firmly planted on the bigger picture. What human being is capable of this Gibbonesque treatment of the American historical profession? Apparently a University of Chicago professor with a whole lot of time on his hands, a man whose primary field of research has little to do with American history. Well, Gibbon's inspiration for his enormous masterwork came from a visit to the ruins of Rome, so why not an equally impressive history from someone working outside his field? A comprehensive summary of the book is an exercise in futility here, but I think I should take a stab at it since I am studying history and often must summarize scads of material into a few precious paragraphs. My review will be inferior anyway compared to the extremely insightful essay found below on this very page.

Novick begins with an examination of the German methodologies of history---an appropriate starting point because Americans wishing to study the past on an advanced level in the nineteenth century needed to go to school in Europe---in an attempt to discover how the first generation of professional American historians approached their craft. To be sure, amateur historians like Parkman, Prescott, and Adams wrote narrative histories on such huge topics as North America, Mexico, and the early governments of the United States. But in an age where scientific methods came of age, men stood up and rejected the narratives, believing that the very same techniques could, and should, be applied to the study of history. An age of strict objectivity called for an equally rigorous impartiality in looking at the past, and the first trained historians here did so with relish. Worshipping the phrase "wie es eigentlich gewesen," or studying history "as it really was," our academic ancestors attempted to collect as much factual evidence from historical sources as possible, crafting "building blocks" of history so that in the near future men could unearth the universal truth by putting these blocks together. Amusingly, Novick discovers that the American historians misunderstood this magical phrase, that it should translate as "as it essentially is," a different ballgame altogether that means a historian should employ his intuition in his studies. Since this is the exact opposite of how our historians applied the phrase, the entire edifice of our profession balances upon a translation error! Study hard for those proficiency exams, my friends!

Novick's scrupulous treatment of the succeeding years of the profession reveals metatectonic (a word that appears throughout the book, and frankly, I love it and use it whenever possible) themes, but the biggest one may be that big social changes lead to big changes in the academy. While many scholars like to think they create rather than react to societal transformations, Novick proves them wrong repeatedly. War, for example, served to bring about sea changes in how historians studied history. The nightmares unfolding at places like Ypres and the concomitant moral discord after that war led to a short period of "doubt casting" in every field of western human endeavor. Things that seemed indisputable before millions died in the mud suddenly assumed a worrisome etherealness, a hazy uncertainty that ushered in the beginnings of relativism. The Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, with its need for absolute convictions (Hitler and Communism bad, Us good), temporarily quashed proto-relativism in favor of consensus. We are where we are at now, in an age of unbridled relativism, "social construction," and "deconstruction" because of the Vietnam War and the rise of the New Left historians. Novick outlines it all in one page after another, pages rife with the words of the historians who were there when it happened.

A short review fails to relate the impressiveness of this work. There are a few omissions here, one being the pedagogical functions of history as mentioned in a previous review. The other problem concerns the shortage of information about earning credentials in the profession. For information on how much fun that process is, you need to look at Theodore Hamerow's curmudgeonly treatment of life in graduate school, "Reflections on History and Historians."

Deliberate misrepresentation of evidence and plagiarism are among the most grievous sins a historian may commit. Not only would this do a disservice to our understanding of the past, but of the present and even the future. Peter Novick's treatment of Charles Beard's critics is a case to these points. Just as Hofstadter and others claimed that Beard had misrepresented the evidence, a similar claim may be made that Novick has misrepresented Hofstadter's critique of Beard. In his book, That Noble Dream, The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, Novick staunchly defends Beard and Becker from their critics by attacking their credibility and dismissing the shortcomings of the progressives. Along the way Novick makes an enticing argument that History as a discipline has been fragmenting, it had been endlessly whittled down internally, and he concluded by proudly proclaiming that history is dead. And his argument is strengthened by its appearance as formal historical writing. But his provocative view of History's fragmentation, is, as Beard would say, only one interpretation. And we must attend to the particular matter of Novick's misrepresentation of Hofstadter's critique of Beard. From that, we might more clearly evaluate Novick's position. Novick not only fails to cite his use of Hofstadter's text entirely honestly, he is guilty of misrepresenting him as well. In The Progressive Historians, Turner, Beard, Parrington, Hofstadter wrote:
In 1938, when a considerable number of intellectuals were queried by the editors of the New Republic for its symposium on "Books That Changed Our Minds," Beard's name ranked second only to Veblen's (and ahead of Dewey's and Freud's) among thinkers acknowledged with gratitude, and the two titles most often mentioned by the respondents were The Theory of the Leisure Class and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. (220)
Though Novick provides the correct title for the source of this information, he nowhere suggests that the following are any but his own words:
In the 1938 New Republic symposium on "Books That Changed our Minds," Beard was ranked second only to Veblen in influence, ahead of Dewey and Freud. (240)

Novick's phrasing certainly wouldn't pass "the smell test" for plagiarism in a historical writing course. He is in the very least guilty of shoddy editing (Stephen Ambrose was skewered for similar shortcomings in his work). As such, this cracks open an unpleasant door for our perception of Novick's work, namely the door of questionable credibility. Though Novick uses the form of historical writing this not presuppose that he is not inaccurate, unbiased, or unprofessional in his methodology. Indeed, his book's premise is that historians cannot be objective; hence, can we believe his is an objective representation? He misrepresented the context of Hofstadter's work and used his words as his own. Is this laudable scholarship?

Scott's work is a meticulously-detailed analysis of the blinding effects of big-picture macro-economics. There's nothing radically new here - remember the old adage that the "slave sees the master, but the master never sees the slave." And he buttresses his standard, post-Communist negativity toward state-ism with well-chosen examples which it's hard to deny - Stalinist collectivization being a standard of this genre. I'm reminded of the old Estonian Communist who said there were "two ways to build the road to socialism: one is that of a highway that cuts straight ahead, blasting through mountains and draining swamps. The other follows the natural contours of the terrain. It might be a little devious, but it arrives at the same destination." (This man was unsurprisingly purged from the ECP in 1950 for "nationalist deviationism.") I'm reminded also of Rene Dumont's and K. S. Karol's critiques of 1960s Cuba, when Fidel was obsessed with creating a "New Man" marching "not just to socialism but communism."

Yet societies like 1920s Russia, or Cuba, or Tanzania did not have the private capitalization necessary for modern development; without the state they could not possibly have been anything other than colonial appendages of those who did. Stalin said in 1931 that an undeveloped Russia was always "beaten for its backwardness; we must catch up to the developed nations or we will be crushed." This was borne out by WW II. Even if Stalin did much "beating" of his own, the NEP-peasant society of the 1920s could not have possibly stood up to Hitler's invasion. Would a victorious Third Reich in the east have given Scott any better example? The state-minimizing model has worked best only in the Atlantic states, and with good reason: only the trans-Atlantic trade created the concentrated capital that could invest in independent development. This was not a viable path for Russia, or any Third World ex-colony.

Another point not addressed is that the masses oif eastern Europe did not joyously celebrate their alleged "emancipation" from collectivist serfdom in 1989; to the contrary, workers clung to their dinosaur factories and peasants to their collectives because these structures, no matter how resented in the past, had come to provide a social security lacking in the new free order. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom Scott quotes at length, admits as much at the end of her book on "Stalin's Peasants."

One case Scott probably dared not touch in his paradigm is American school consolidation/integration, with its centralization, massive bussing of children, and all-around disruption of community life. This surely is a pointed example of "seeing like a state;" but how to deal with those who resisted such "collectivized education" sympathetically? Looked at objectively, the outraged parent who overturned "invading" buses of black schoolchildren in Boston is morally equivalent to the revolting kulak who took up arms against Bolshevik collectivizers of his land. Scott nicely sidesteps this unprogressive example which by itself pulls much of his moral argument out from under itself. What would be Scott's answer to the general shabbiness and disfunction of the US public school system? To go back to "community education"? - which, public or private, would re-enforce all the old inequities of geography, class, and race.

To Scott's credit, he critiques the trendy neo-liberalism built around von Hayek and Friedman, and warns against private corporate equivalents of blindness. The current craze for "eminent domain" decrees that condemn small property in favor of big investors carries his analysis one step further, where the state - in that exemplary democracy, the United States - becomes as purblind as Julius Nyere when allied with corporate power.

Scott asserts--that states have made concerted efforts to put in place systems that would improve the human condition. However, rather than improve the human condition, bureaucratic processes and procedures enhanced the legibility of citizen populations for purposes of control as control applies to productivity "taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion". Authoritarian, hierarchical schemes were designed to record, monitor, and control populations to advance and sustain economic growth for the state. These elite schemes "to improve the human condition" failed, because the schemes were not originally designed to improve the human condition.
Prior to reading the text, I had imagined what schemes might improve the human condition. I thought in terms of Max Weber's life chances--food, water, shelter, and health care. Bureaucracies, legibility, manipulation, force relocation, and revolution never occurred to me. In Scott's examples, people independently eking out a living without government interference or aid, are heaved up like trees out of their sustaining systems and planted in hostile microclimates. They are given an impossible objective without any notion of self-efficacy or personal benefit. Here the state anticipates an alienated, marginalized people will comply with a continuous, stagnate, emotionless organized notion of a productive utopia. High modernists did not scheme to improve the human condition. They did not think in terms of what the state could do for its people, but rather what the people could do for the state.
It's a great read.

This book is probably best summarized by its moral: The most successful systems are those that exploit the knowledge of all their people, rather than assuming that society can be changed from the top. All the knowledge of how the world actually works, and the actual complexity of getting things done, resides in the people who need to do it, rather than in the minds of planners far from the action. Beware of those who believe that the people's indigenous ways are backwards, pre-scientific and ignorant; in reality, though the people's methods may not have all the rigor of the latest scientific theories, they are likely to be precisely adapted to all the complexity of the world around them.

But Seeing Like A State is much more than that. It is a thoroughly documented attack on high-modernist thinking. This is the mindset of a Le Corbusier, who comes in for a thorough lashing at Scott's hands. Le Corbusier and his disciples decided that modern cities were all wrong: their "chaotic" layout must indicate that they were corrupt and unworkable within. Jane Jacobs most famously tore into that fundamental confusion in The Death and Life of Great American Cities : surface chaos actually conceals remarkable underlying purpose and form. Scott takes a lot from Jacobs. Along with the classical anarchists, she seems to be his biggest inspiration.

The high-modernist ideal is at its worst when it's combined with infinite state power. Combine these two and you get the evils of the former Soviet Union: shift peasants off their plots into "modern" industrial agriculture and force them to adhere to the latest theories of geometric crop planting -- theories like monoculture, identically spaced crops ... all very geometrical and orderly in the mind of someone who's not imaginative enough to see past the surface. And this mindset assumes throughout that the people must just be ignorant: they mustn't want to live in crowded cities; they mustn't know what they're doing when they farm their polycultured, "chaotic" crops. When combined with state power, the expert is the designated local god. That way lies ruin.

In a lot of respects, this is not an argument against experts, though it could be misconstrued that way. For one thing, scientific experts really do have a lot to contribute to, say, peasant agronomy, and they really can contribute a lot to improving (say) rural sanitation. The trouble is when a few threads come together:

1. Ignorance of local conditions.
2. Confusing the thing being modeled with the model itself.
3. The desire to make the world look like the laboratory
4. The power to turn items 1 through 3 into reality.

Item 4 is what makes Seeing Like A State into an argument for anarchism. States get most of Scott's ire, because they do bequeath this power onto dictators. But industry comes in for a spanking, too. In fact chapter 8 of Seeing Like A State is the next logical thing to read after The Omnivore's Dilemma: it explores at a slightly different level the problems with scientific farming as it's practiced in the United States. Rather than adapt farming to local conditions, American agriculture bends the natural world to its particular model of how farming should be done. This includes monoculture, whose predictable consequence is the rise of pests that are adapted to eat that monocultured crop. The next step in the game, if you're an American agricultural conglomerate, is to spray loads of pesticides on your fields. Evolution can play the game too, though, so it responds by building pests who are better adapted to those pesticides. And so the arms race continues. And so the soil erodes, the pesticide runoff blackens, and so forth.

The root of that whole war is the assumption that nature should play the game our way, rather than that we should bend to it. In turn, this monomania is a consequence of straight-ahead economic logic that asks what a profit-maximizing firm (farm) would do, then produces an unambiguous answer: maximize output. When cost and output are the only variables, the model is very clear. It's only clear, of course, if you ignore other things, such as long-term soil degradation. Including these other variables would complicate the model. And, again, if you confuse the model with the thing being modeled, you come to believe that maximizing output is unambiguously and objectively good, rather than being the result of a fixed set of assumptions.

This is a relentlessly powerful and unbelievably sad book: it picks off, one by one, the forces that made the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries look grotesque. It suffers from some verbosity; like Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, though, it always manages to save itself within a few paragraphs of where your patience starts to wear thin. The sections on Russian collectivization, the Tanzanian Ujamaa, Le Corbusier, and the creation of Brasília, in particular, are worth the price of admission on their own. In all these cases, the thing that the experts created was meant -- quite consciously -- to negate the society around it. Brasília was the anti-São Paulo, for instance. Only by relocating to an unoccupied spot in Brazil and starting afresh could the experts create the world as "science" told them it was meant to be made. The consequences were predictable: starvation in Tanzania and in Russia, and a city in Brazil that only survives because people color outside the lines.

Rather than go theoretically very deep, Scott insists on painting the details vividly; I assume this was a stylistic choice, in keeping with the theme that all the intelligence in a system is at the "edge of the network." Don't write like someone positioned at the center, I imagine Scott saying to himself; write like you're at the edge. And so he does. This is where a lot of his verbosity comes from.

I have only two wishes for this book:

1. I wish it gave some more criteria by which to judge modern-day schemes organized by experts. As luck would have it, for instance, my roommate pointed me to a video of William McDonough describing his plans for new Chinese cities -- McDonough being one of the Cradle to Cradle guys. The Chinese government has asked McDonough to apply cradle-to-cradle principles to city design; it looks like he's building a number of 400,000-person cities for them. If you watch the video, and you have the "beware experts with unlimited power" principle in mind, you'll wonder whether McDonough's work is another Brasília. His model city surely has the geometric perfection and cleverness of a Brasília or an Ujamaa village. Should I be scared of it?

Probably the answer is simple, if we're listening to Scott. We need to ask McDonough, "Did you consult with residents to ask how they feel about this city? Or did you impose it from on high, using seemingly perfect principles of architecture and resource conservation?" Like all principles, Scott's are guidelines rather than rules, but it stands to reason that the people who know how to live are the people who'll be doing the living, not their overlords.

2. I'd like more examples of successful scientific interventions. Without them, Scott's book occasionally sounds anti-scientific. Surely it's not that, but the absence of positive examples makes that a sensible interpretation.

The $100-billion development question is: how do we combine expert scientific research with indigenous experimentation? How can the West bring its science to nations that could really use the help, without being scientific imperialists about it? What could Western science bring back from Africa and Asia? The Western model of industrial agriculture is really broken, or so it seems to a lot of knowledgeable folks; it would be really helpful to get a rigorous scientific understanding of sustainability from people who've sustained their agriculture for thousands of years. I would have liked Scott to provide examples of fruitful two-way collaboration.

This book will appeal to a lot of people. It'll appeal to those who have already taken Jane Jacobs's messages about cities to heart. For that matter, it'll remind a lot of people why they love cities. It goes into more depth on Soviet collectivization than many of us will have encountered. And it will make us think twice before we allow experts to reshape communities from on high.

I've found this book useful, breathtakingly so, in so many ways these days; Scott raises a question at the heart of almost all our current civic debates, even in my own micro-field of schooling and education. I find myself saying, time and again, "she's thinking like a state", and it fits and helps me resort out the arguments. Thank you thank you, Prof. Scott.

I got this book because it was recommended as background reading for a local debate about CAFOs. I like the meticulous detail in this treatment of social engineering by governments. That is not a liberal/conservative issue, but one which is worth looking at wherever there is a risk of social control that can lead to inequality and injustice.

A tremendous warning is the one Maude Marlow makes with this wonderful book... fascinating in essence, it lets us know why we must head towards a different kind of "growth"... simple: we are finishing even water supplies! the degree of detail she describes cannot be interpreted other than a last warning... either we rationalize our economies (world, national and even individual) or we are condemned to a next war: for water!

Referring to water, Ms. Barlow says: "...those areas of life thought to be common heritage of humanity for the benefit of the many, now coming under corporate control for the benefit of the few (rich)" is a phrase that resonates in my head as I drink water from my purchased bottle of water and wake up to conscience of this once simple act and its implications...

Worth reading document, rich (to say the least) in data, research material, etc.

¡Bravo Ms. Barlow!

Maude Barlow has written a very readable review of water policy. At first this would not seem like a very exciting topic, but water policy will soon affect all of us as we deplete the supply of accessible clean water.

Ms. Barlow divides her book into five chapters. She starts by explaining the crisis. Basically, with so many humans on the planet, we are managing to deplete or pollute our finite resource of clean water. We are withdrawing water from aquifers at a rate faster than the aquifers can recharge. Through global warming, we are melting the glaciers that provide us with river water. Through carelessness in industry and agriculture, we are polluting the very same water that we drink.

In the second chapter, the author describes how a powerful water industry is forming to control these dwindling resources. She gives multiple examples of how the industry is not developing for the betterment of humanity or for fair distribution of water, but to reap profit from the increasingly scarce resource.

In the third chapter, she describes the problems with technological fixes such as desalination, water nanotechnology, and cloud seeding. She also emphasizes the ethical and practical problems with bottled water.

In the fourth chapter, she discusses some brave activists who are fighting back against the corporate control our water. She does a good job in covering the activities in multiple continents - the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa - and giving concrete examples of activists who have pushed back and won against corporate water interests.

Ms. Barlow finishes with a chapter called "The Future of Water." Here she reviews potential sources of conflict over water. How will the water in the Colorado River be shared as the population in the US Southwest continues to grow? How will Israel, Jordan, and Palestine share the water of the Jordan River? How will Turkey and Syria resolve the conflict over the big dam project on the Euphrates? She finishes by speculating on potential alternatives to conflict. How do we encourage water conservation and fight for water justice?

There is also an appendix with "Sources and Further Reading" as well as a good index.

On the whole, this is an excellent book to review the upcoming water crisis. You will also understand more about the policies that are exacerbating the problems as well as some potential solutions.

This is a must read for everyone on this planet! Filled with alarming facts and information. Most people are completely unaware of the water crisis, so read this book and tell everyone you know.